Making My Peace … with optimism and pessimism in athletic performance
The Paris 2024 Olympics is about to commence, and athletes are either ready or not. Can they do anything now to improve their athletic performance? Sports psychologists say yes!
Researchers of a 2018 study at four universities in Spain maintain that optimism is a factor in athletic performance. The objective of the literature review using five sports databases over 26 years of published scientific works in ISI Web of Knowledge, Psycinfo, SportsDiscus, Scopus, and Pubmed, totalling 630 references, was to discern the possible correlation between optimism and sports performance. The researchers used studies in which male and female athletes, of all types, were tested on a scale from highly optimistic to neutral to pessimistic. There were only seven scientific studies that met that criteria.
Optimism, psychologists say, is regarded as the tendency to await favourable consequences in life occurrences. This tendency manifests in the confidence and persistence to search for an objective or challenge. A pessimistic athlete is more indecisive under the same situations.
Optimism has been found to be a protective barrier against certain negative disorders in mental health, such as depression because it tends towards more adequate confrontation strategies and higher self-control in stressful situations than pessimism.
The study found that athletes that scored high on the optimism test performed athletically better than pessimists and recovered faster after negative feedback or a negative performance. Athletes with higher scores on the optimism test were less anxious and more confident than lower scoring athletes.
Optimistic athletes also obtained better results in the second trial after receiving negative feedback in the first trial. More optimistic athletes performed better after committing an error or a lapse of performance than other athletes. They bounced back more quickly – they recovered their composure and confidence more quickly – than pessimists or neutral athletes.
Also, older optimistic athletes performed better than younger optimistic athletes, but not significantly better.
Progressively negative feedback or poor performances, trial after trial, mainly in close succession, depleted all athletes of confidence and they all performed progressively worse after the third trial. But more optimistic athletes had a lower decrease in results. Pessimistic athletes bombed badly.
However, the sports psychologists recognized that the number of studies that specifically measured performance was “rather low … which is a clear methodological deficit.” Additionally, the methods of measuring performance were not standard across the seven studies. Overall though, they concluded that the studies indicated a correlation between optimism and positive performance in sport.
Making my peace with optimism and pessimism in athletic performance, I learned the following:
- Optimism helps to achieve positive athletic performances
- Pessimism doesn’t get you to the finish line ahead of others
- Optimism combined with confidence and persistence pays off`
- Pessimism is full of indecisiveness
- Optimism helps to achieve higher self-control under stress
- Pessimism leads to giving up
- Optimism leads to giving it a go
- Pessimism rarely leads to gold
- Optimism opens up opportunities
Martina Nicolls: Rainy Day Healing – MAKING MY PEACE
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